" Choice, like judgment, is much less a principle than a consequence, a balance sheet, a formulation which intervenes at certain moments of the internal monologue and of action but whose meaning is formed day by day. Whether it is a question of action or even of thought, the fruitful modes of consciousness are those in which the object does not need to be posited, because consciousness inhabits it and is at work in it, because each response the outside gives to the initiatives of consciousness is immediately meaningful for it and gives rise to a
new intervention on its part, and because it is in fact what it does, not only in the eyes of others but for itself. When Marx said, ''I am not a Marxist," and Kierkegaard more or less said, ''I am not a Christian," they meant that action is too present to the person acting to admit the ostentation of a declared choice. The declared choice is nearly the proof that there has been no choice. "

― Maurice Merleau-Ponty , Adventures of the Dialectic